“Jesus!” he said fervently. “I think the whole ruddy world’s gone mad. First that great light in the sky-”
“Lit us up like a milliard star shells all at once, didn’t it?” Ken Embry agreed. “I wonder how the devil Jerry managed that? If it had stayed lit much longer, every bloody Nazi fighter in the world would have been able to spy us up here.”
Another Lane blew up, not far away. “What was that?” Bagnall demanded. “Anybody see a Jerry plane?”
None of the gunners answered. Neither did the bomb-aimer. Embry spoke to the radioman: “Any better luck there, Ted?”
“Not a bit of it,” Edward Lane answered. “Ever since that light, I’m getting nothing but hash on every frequency.”
“Bloody balls-up, that’s what it is,” Embry said. As if to italicize his words, two more bombers went up in flames. His voice rose to near a scream: “What’s doing that? It’s not flak and it’s not planes, so what the hell is it?”
Next to the pilot, Bagnall shivered in his seat. Flying missions over Germany was frightening enough in and of itself, but when Lanes started getting blown out of the sky for no reason at all… His heart shrank to a small, frozen lump in his chest. His head turned this way and that, trying to see what the devil was murdering his friends. Beyond the polished Perspex, the night remained inscrutable.
Then the big, heavy Lancaster shook in the air for an instant like a leaf on a rippling stream. Even through the growl of the plane’s four Merlins, he heard a shrieking roar that made every hair on his body try to stand erect. A lean shark-shape swept past, impossibly swift, impossibly graceful. Two huge exhausts glared like the red eyes of a beast of prey. One gunner had enough presence of mind to fire at it, but it vanished ahead of the Lane in the blink of an eye.
“Did you-see that?” Ken Embry asked in a tiny voice.
“I-think so,” Bagnall answered as cautiously. He wasn’t quite sure he believed in the terrible apparition himself. “Where did the Germans come up with it?”
“Can’t be German,” the pilot said. “We know what they have, same as they know about us. My dad in a Spitfire above the. Somme is likelier than a Jerry in-that.”
“Well, if he’s not a German, who the devil is he?” Bagnall asked.
“Damned if I know, and I don’t care to hang about and learn, in case he decides to come back.” Embry banked away from, the track of the impossible fighter.
“Ground flak-” Bagnall said as he watched the altimeter unwind. Embry ignored him. He shut up, feeling foolish. When set against this monster that swept bombers from the sky like a charwoman wielding her broom against spilled salt, ground flak was hardly worth worrying about.
Jens Larssen’s thumb throbbed fiercely. The nail was already turning black; he suspected he’d lose it. He scowled as darkly as his fair, sunny features allowed. He was a physicist, damn it, not a carpenter. What hurt worse than his maimed digit was the snickers from the young punks who made up most of the work crew that was building strange things in the west stands of Stagg Field.
The evening sun at his back, he tramped along Fifty-seventh Street toward the Quadrangle Club. His appetite wasn’t what it had been before he’d tried driving his thumbnail into a two-by-four, but food and coffee kept him going in place of sleep. As soon as he’d gulped his meal, he’d be back at the pile again, hammering away-this time, with luck, a little more carefully.
He sucked in a lungful of muggy Chicago air. Having been born and raised in San Francisco, he wondered why three million people chose to live in a place that was too hot and sticky half the time and too damned cold most of the rest.
“They have to be crazy,” he said aloud.
A student going the other way gave him an odd look. He felt himself flush. Dressed as he was in a dirty undershirt and a pair of chinos, he didn’t look like anyone who belonged on the University of Chicago campus, let alone a faculty member. He’d draw more looks in the Quadrangle Club. Too bad for the Latin professors in their moth-eaten Harris tweeds, he thought.
He walked past Cobb Gate; the grotesques carved on the big stone pile that was the northern entrance to Hull Court always made him smile. Botany Pond, surrounded on three sides by the Hull Biological Laboratories, was a nice place to sit and read when he had the time. Lately, he hadn’t had the time very often.
He was coming up to Mitchell Tower when his shadow disappeared. One second it stretched out ahead of him, all fine and proper, the next it was gone. The tower, modeled after that of Magdalen College at Oxford, was suddenly bathed in harsh white light.
Larssen stared up into the sky. The glowing spot there grew and faded and changed color as he watched. Everyone around was pointing at it and exclaiming: “What’s that?” “What could it be?” “Have you ever seen anything like that in all your life?” People stuck their heads out of windows and came running outside to see.
The physicist watched and gaped with everyone else. Little by little, the new light dimmed and his old, familiar shadow reasserted itself. Before it had fully recovered, Larssen wheeled and began running back the way he had come. He dodged past dozens of people who were still just standing and gawking. “Where’s the fire, buddy?” one of them yelled.
He didn’t answer. He just ran harder toward Stagg Field. The fire was in the sky. He knew what sort of fire it had to be, too: the fire he and his colleagues were seeking to call forth from the uranium atom. So far, no atomic pile in the United States had even managed a self-sustaining chain reaction. The crew in the west stands was trying to put together one that would.
No one in his most horrid nightmares imagined the Germans had already devised not just a pile but a bomb, even if the uranium atom had first been split in Germany in 1938. As he ran, Larssen wondered how the Nazis had exploded a bomb over Chicago. So far as he knew, their planes couldn’t reach even New York.
For that matter, he wondered why the Germans had set off their bomb so high overhead-too high, really, for it to do any damage. Maybe, he thought, they had it aboard some oceanbestriding rocket like the ones the pulp magazines talked about. But no one had dreamed the Germans could do that, either.
Nothing about the bomb made any rational sense. The dreadful thing was up there, though, and had to be German. It surely wasn’t American or English.
Larssen had an even more horrid thought. What if it was Japanese? He didn’t think the Japs had the know-how to build an atomic bomb, but he hadn’t thought they had the know-how to bomb Pearl Harbor so devastatingly well, or to take the Philippines, or Guam, or Wake, or Hong Kong and Singapore and Burma from the British, or practically drive the Royal Navy out of the Indian Ocean, or… The further he went, the longer the melancholy list in his head grew.
“Maybe it is the goddamn Japs,” he said, and ran harder than ever.
Sam Yeager had the curtain closed over the train window by his seat, to keep the westering sun out of Bobby Fiore’s eyes while his roommate slept. In his younger days, he would have resented that: having grown up without traveling more than a couple of days’ ride from his folks’ farm, he was wild to see as much of the country as he could when he started playing ball. Train and bus windows were his openings on a wider world.
“I’ve seen the country, all right,” he muttered. He’d rolled through just about every piece of it, with swings into Canada and Mexico to boot. Rubbernecking for one more swing through the staid flatlands of Illinois no longer meant as much as it once had.
He remembered the sun rising over the arid mountains near Salt Lake City, shining off the lake and the white salt flats straight into his dazzled eyes. Now that had been scenery worth looking at; he’d carry the picture to his grave with him. Fields and barns and ponds just couldn’t compete, though he wouldn’t have lived in Salt Lake City for Joe DiMaggio’s salary. Well, maybe for DiMaggio’s salary, he thought.